Smart, ethical websites can allow website visitors to remain anonymous while still personalising the site to improve their visits – Marcus Nyeholt, Head of Technology, explains.

Personalisation shouldn't be creepy

At Symbiote we see personalisation as a way to make websites useful to people – and for them to control what they see and where their personal data is stored. We call this personalisation for people or personal personalisation.

If you’re not convinced that personal personalisation that respects people’s data is important, the Cambridge Analytica data scandal is just one of many examples of what can happen when personalised information is bundled with other users' data and used to manipulate large population groups. 

You’re probably familiar with the creepy kinds of personalisation where all your clicks and searches, posts and site visits are tracked and sometimes sold. That’s what leads to all those ads you see popping up for things you’ve searched for or unwanted emails. Creepy personalisation is there to manipulate you, sell to you or profit from your data.

Why we create websites with personal personalisation

Everyone in the Symbiote team has the same drive: to make technology that improves people’s lives. So, it follows that we make smart, ethical websites where visitors are informed and assisted rather than persuaded or manipulated. 

That’s why we wrote an open source module in Silverstripe that lets a website owner personalise their site for visitors, so people can remain anonymous while storing some personalisation data on their own device so the site is more useful to them during their future visits, while avoiding large scale data farming and aggregation. 

We see personalisation as a way to improve a site visitor's life – reducing the number of clicks, keystrokes or steps they need to go through to get information, buy something, make a decision or have the experience they came to a site for.

What does an ethically-developed personalised website look like?

An ethically-developed personalised website can give site visitors control over their online identity – allowing both anonymous and logged-in browsing options, which both adapt to a person’s clicks, searches or preferences to offer them relevant information or options. Visitors can be offered information they need (and might not know they need), or led through tricky decision-making processes, such as  applying for something or choosing a product or service.

For example, a council website could be developed to provide secure personalisation so users can remain anonymous while agreeing to save some information onto their own device to improve their future visits. Their site might be set up to respond to a previous search – for example, if the site visitor had previously searched for dog parks, on subsequent visits the site might suggest other dog-related information, or if the user is located in a different state, it might offer tourism-related information.  

Residents willing to create logins could customise their view of their council site to create their own dashboard, choosing the information they want to see on a single page, without needing to search for it. 

How do we keep personalisation information safe?

In the open source Silverstripe personalisation module we created, each user’s personal data is privately stored on their own device and its use is restricted to that site’s code – relevant actions that a site owner has deemed important are recorded on the user's device, and used with later interactions. This site owner never sees an individual user's set of behaviours, nor has access to aggregate it alongside other users. 

Organisations can collect and use data while providing personal personalisation

Organisations can create websites and apps that are helpful to their users, while still collecting useful analytical data, without putting their users (and therefore, themselves) at any risk. 

Site owners can see the outcome of personalisation in action, and whether a chosen personalisation pathway is being utilised, but this remains anonymous and isn’t linked to other individual behaviours. They can still put lots of anonymous data together – aggregate it – and see patterns in the ways different people are using the site, what they’re looking for, when they’re looking, how they use services, without being able to connect individuals across different journeys. 

The Silverstripe personalisation module we built enables a site owner to use their Customer Management System (CMS) to define the types of user interactions that build a profile – time spent on a page, clicks on particular elements, provided locations, site that they came from (e.g. Google search or link), searches, clicking on a particular kind of page etc. 

They can then make decisions about the kinds of information a person doing these actions might be interested in.

Sites can be smart, ethical and personal

It’s possible to gather data and improve sites without needing to collect and store people’s private data.

We’re advocates for website owners to use smart sites that inform and assist people (rather than persuading or tricking them and selling their data – which should go without saying).